I’m a high school theater director. For a production of a play called Radium Girls I would like to construct a sort of chandelier of 75 or so paper lanterns — different sizes but not tiny, clustering in a space about 20’ wide.
I would like the lanterns to light up one-by-one over the course of about 90 minutes. They could come on randomly. Fading in would be nice.
Some notes:
These would need to be bright enough to be visibly on even with stage lighting on. They don’t have to be lighting the actors.
It would be ideal to have a single power source and a single controller, so no one has to clamber high above the stage to switch out batteries. Perhaps a stagehand, on a cue, pushes a button and the program runs on its own.
I have a supportive tech department on my side, and I do okay with programming Arduinos (I also teach computer science). So assume intermediate-level skills but no more.
Construction and rigging won’t be the problem.
Budget of about $300 at the most.
Is this possible? And where should I begin? Thanks in advance.
I don't know about the budget of $300, sounds tight to me, can you even make 75 lanterns, without lights, with that?
Simple on / off is a lot easier than fading, for simple on / off you could just use mains powered LED lights and a bunch of relays (solid state or mechanical) to turn them on. Dead simple, just a lot of wiring (From what you say I am making the assumption that you or someone on your team knows how to wire mains safely, if not then either forget this idea or find a suitably qualified parent / relative of the staff and bribe them to help with free tickets to the show).
Controlling 75 lights is more than you can achieve with just the digital pins on any Arduino I am aware of, the solution to that is probably shift registers, which will easily give you 75 (or more) outputs.
The good news is paper lanterns are cheap in bulk from Amazon or a drop shipper.
I don't know if any addressable LED strips can put out enough light for the task. Even then, getting the lights farther away from each other — like, a little farther than the distance of lights on a string of Christmas lights — is important.
These, for instance, are too close to each other and probably not bright enough (although I'm not sure — some LEDs are really piercing).
I'm no theatre lighting designer, but somehow I doubt it. Only way to find out is to try some. I suspect the distances between the lanterns is going to mean you can't use addressable LED strips anyway.
I think you need to make some lanterns with different kinds of lights in them, suspend them above the stage, sit at the back of the theatre and judge which ones give you the effect you are looking for.
Randomness makes testing harder - there's the risk that a light didn't come on because it has a wiring issue or it's just that the RNG didn't pick it yet.
I suggest that you pre-generate the order that the lights come on in and store it in the code. You could put it in progmem if necessary but I doubt that it will be.
With that in place, the code is trivial. It seems that all the tricky bits are shift registers and wiring.
Given how powerful theatre lighting is, I really doubt that LEDs will be a feasible solution - they'll vanish.
Is the play based on the book "radium girls"? I bought the book because I have scars from the use of radium to remove birthmarks. Cure was worse than the birthmarks. The story is really, really, scary, how such ignorance and disregard for peoples health while getting rich from their work.
Good luck,
Paul
Make sure to test a lantern in a safe location to verify whatever light you choose does not generate enough heat to ignite the lantern, incandescent bulbs are likely not suitable.